Blog Archive

Sunday, October 11, 2015

Superhero Surge:

There's always been good superhero entertainment. Even in the 50's and 60's there was Batman and Superman on tv. But recently this kind of afterthought in the entertainment world -- a batman movie here, a superman movie there -- has become the premiere content in theaters and on television, with more abundant and diverse options than ever before. You could even say the superhero business is vibrant.

There's a Superhero Surge out there, and no signs of it slowing down or losing steam. Consumers are loving this stuff, they can't get enough of it. There hasn't been a single money losing Marvel movie ever published. Most of them rank among the highest grossing films of all time. Producers and consumers alike are conspiring to turn all of western entertainment into one giant comic book wonderland.

Meanwhile, superhero television is stronger than ever. With The Flash, Arrow, Supergirl, Daredevil 2, Legends of Tomorrow, Luke Cage and Jessica Jones all eminently watchable shows. (There's also a bunch of bad superhero tv shows but we can just ignore them). Each of these tend to be hour long shows. We could be talking over 100 1 hour long shows here. The commercial breaks knock that down to 40 minutes each, but that's still 80 episodes of anime.

American programming producing as much scripted entertainment as 128 episodes of anime? What world is this? Japan does in fact produce more than 128 good episodes of anime per year, so American programming hasn't surpassed Japanese programming, but that's still amazing. Spectacular. At no other time has America even gotten close, it's not even been comparable.

2016 isn't even a special year. All the way until 2020, we're seeing tons of superhero programming equivalent to next year's bonanza. All this superhero stuff is pretty much doubling the amount of good entertainment being produced per year. Without superhero programming, we wouldn't have anything to look forward to in the west. But because of superheroes, we're richer than we've ever been before. Bring on the superheroes. There's never enough. Just keep 'em coming.